Luton-based
Trumpf, a world leader in sheet metal fabrication machinery and laser technology, unveiled the next generation and new lines of its TruMicro ultrashort pulse lasers (USP) earlier this year. The two TruMicro 6000 and TruMicro 2000 product families feature new technology platforms to boost power and enhance versatility.
USPs see frequent use in electronics manufacturing, where they serve to produce printed circuit boards, displays and the like. Steffen Rübling, the product manager responsible for Trumpf’s TruMicro lasers, said: “With the two new generations of our TruMicro lasers, we are expanding our micro-processing product portfolio and offering solutions suited to satisfy the market’s evermore challenging demands. With the benefit of powerful infrared lasers, we are able to convert both the TruMicro 2000 and the TruMicro 6000 to green and ultraviolet wavelengths while maintaining the high beam quality.
“This enables us to offer the USP laser best suited to the customer’s use case. With 100W, the next-generation TruMicro 2000 is the most powerful industrial ultrashort pulse fibre laser. The TruMicro 6000 offers up to 200W at pulses in the femtosecond range for even higher performance.”
Based on slab technology, the next-generation TruMicro 6000 can be deployed in various industries for use cases ranging from cutting to drilling. The active medium, a crystal that amplifies laser light, looks like a tile or slab, hence the name. The laser light travels through the slab, zig-zagging between its two end faces. The slab’s advantage is that this active medium is very conducive to cooling, which enables high-pulse energies at high repetition rates. With pulse energies of several millijoules, this is an excellent tool for modifying glass up to 6mm thick and for drilling.
The ultra-short pulses reduce thermal stress on highly sensitive materials. High peak pulse power levels enable excellent quality paired with maximum productivity. The next-generation TruMicro 2000 earns high marks in its category with an average power output of up to 100W. All that power accelerates the machining process. The fibre-based TruMicro 2000’s parameters such as pulse duration, repetition rate and pulse energy can be variably adjusted within milliseconds to suit a wide range of use cases.
Individual pulses’ energy and duration remain remarkably stable. These pulses can serve many purposes, for example, to cut highly sensitive medical products such as stents, to machine surfaces and to mark a wide variety of materials ranging from glass and plastics to corrosion-resistant metals. The new TruMicro 2000’s compact, lightweight design is one selling point.
Another is that the new lasers may be used with an LLK-U, a fibre-optic cable for USPs based on hollow-core fibres. This type of cable makes it so much easier to apply ultra-short pulses in industrial use cases. The hollow-core fibre enables laser light to take a stable, simple path from the beam source to the optics and then straight to the part without having to be redirected by a complex free-beam guide or several deflection mirrors.